Why do many Disney cartoon characters wear white gloves

You may have noticed that many Disney cartoon characters wear white gloves. But it is unlikely that you have seriously thought about what is the reason for such a love of animators for these accessories. It is difficult for us to imagine Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck or Pinocchio without gloves and, believe me, they are used in animation not just as a fashion day.

Animators dress their characters in white gloves for three reasons. The first is to save time on drawing hands and paws, which, unlike gloves, have a lot of small details. The second is that it is easier to depict white gloves on a dark background. Well, the third reason is that gloves help to humanize such characters as animals, birds and inanimate objects.

Walt Disney himself came up with the idea of using gloves. For the first time they dressed up Mickey Mouse in 1929 in the cartoon "Village Opera". This was the second appearance of the legendary mouse on the screen, and in the first picture "Mad Plane", released in 1928, Mickey did not have gloves.

In 1957, Walt Disney, in a conversation with his biographer, said this about gloves:

The gloves helped artists and animators to do their work faster and better. Until the late 1980s, computer graphics were not used in animation and each frame had to be drawn manually. Therefore, at the dawn of animation, most of the characters looked primitive – they had a big head, large eyes, and even thin limbs.

To depict the hands anatomically accurately was an unforgivable luxury for the cartoon industry, and it was easy to draw gloves and they were about the same for all the characters. And against the background of the heroes ' bodies, mostly dark, the white gloves were not lost, but looked very contrasting. The character could even press his hands to his chest and they did not merge with the body.